scholarly journals The Arab Americans

2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-109
Author(s):  
Steven Salaita

Since 9/11, Arab Americans have been the subject of much discussion inboth popular and scholarly forums. Books on the suddenly visible Arab-American community have been published recently or are forthcoming, andcourses dealing with Arab Americans are gradually entering university curricula.This interest is cross-disciplinary, having become evident in numeroushumanities and social science fields.Yet this interest is bound largely to the political marketplace of ideas, foran emergent Arab-American studies existed well before 9/11 and had been onthe brink of increased visibility on the eve of 9/11. It took 9/11, however, forthis body of scholarship to generate broad attention. In addition, 9/11 alteredthe trajectories that had already been established, though not as dramaticallyas an unaffiliated observer might believe. Gregory Orfalea was among thegroup of scholars and artists who were assessing Arab America before 9/11through his work as a writer and editor. Orfalea continues his contribution tothat project with his latest book, The Arab Americans: A History, a voluminoustext that mixes exposition, commentary, and analysis.The author’s cross-disciplinary book will be of interest to students andscholars in the humanities and the social sciences, for it contains elements ofhistoriography, sociology, literary criticism, memoir, and anthropology. Theintroduction and first chapter recount a trip he took as a young man in 1972with his jaddu (grandfather) to Arbeen, Syria, his grandfather’s hometown.Subsequent chapters explore a number of sociocultural and political issuesof interest to the Arab-American community, including the politics of theArab world, activism (historical and contemporary) in Arab America, therelationship between Arab Americans and the American government at boththe local and federal levels, religious traditions in Arab America, and theinstability and diversity of Arab-American identity ...

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Efnan Dervişoğlu

Almanya’ya işçi göçü, neden ve sonuçları, sosyal boyutlarıyla ele alınmış; göç ve devamındaki süreçte yaşanan sorunlar, konunun uzmanlarınca dile getirilmiştir. Fakir Baykurt’un Almanya öyküleri, sunduğu gerçekler açısından, sosyal bilimlerin ortaya koyduğu verilerle bağdaşan edebiyat ürünleri arasındadır. Yirmi yılını geçirdiği Almanya’da, göçmen işçilerle ve aileleriyle birlikte olup işçi çocuklarının eğitimine yönelik çalışmalarda bulunan yazarın gözlem ve deneyimlerinin ürünü olan bu öyküler, kaynağını yaşanmışlıktan alır; çalışmanın ilk kısmında, Fakir Baykurt’un yaşamına ve Almanya yıllarına dair bilgi verilmesi, bununla ilişkilidir. Öykülere yansıyan çocuk yaşamı ise çalışmanın asıl konusunu oluşturmaktadır. “Ev ve aile yaşamı”, “Eğitim yaşamı ve sorunları”, “Sosyal çevre, arkadaşlık ilişkileri ve Türk-Alman ayrılığı” ile “İki kültür arasında” alt başlıklarında, Türkiye’den göç eden işçi ailelerinde yetişen çocukların Almanya’daki yaşamları, karşılaştıkları sorunlar, öykülerin sunduğu veriler ışığında değerlendirilmiş; örneklemeye gidilmiştir. Bu öyküler, edebiyatın toplumsal gerçekleri en iyi yansıtan sanat olduğu görüşünü doğrular niteliktedir ve sosyolojik değerlendirmelere açıktır. ENGLISH ABSTRACTMigration and Children in Fakir Baykurt’s stories from GermanyThe migration of workers to Germany has been taken up with its causes, consequences and social dimensions; the migration and the problems encountered in subsequent phases have been stated by experts in the subject. Fakir Baykurt’s stories from Germany, regarding the reality they represent, are among the literary forms that coincide with the facts supplied by social sciences. These stories take their sources from true life experiences as the products of observations and experiences with migrant workers and their families in Germany where the writer has passed twenty years of his life and worked for the education of the worker’s children; therefore information related to Fakir Baykurt’s life and his years in Germany are provided in the first part of the study.  The life of children reflected in the stories constitutes the main theme of the study.  Under  the subtitles of “Family and Home Life”, “Education Life and related issues”, “Social environment, friendships and Turkish-German disparity” and “Amidst two cultures”, the lives in Germany of children who have been  raised in working class  families and  who have immigrated from Turkey are  evaluated under the light of facts provided by the stories and examples are given. These stories appear to confirm that literature is an art that reflects the social reality and is open to sociological assessments.KEYWORDS: Fakir Baykurt; Germany; labor migration; child; story


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Sari Hanafi

This study investigates the preachers and their Friday sermons in Lebanon, raising the following questions: What are the profiles of preachers in Lebanon and their academic qualifications? What are the topics evoked in their sermons? In instances where they diagnosis and analyze the political and the social, what kind of arguments are used to persuade their audiences? What kind of contact do they have with the social sciences? It draws on forty-two semi-structured interviews with preachers and content analysis of 210 preachers’ Friday sermons, all conducted between 2012 and 2015 among Sunni and Shia mosques. Drawing from Max Weber’s typology, the analysis of Friday sermons shows that most of the preachers represent both the saint and the traditional, but rarely the scholar. While they are dealing extensively with political and social phenomena, rarely do they have knowledge of social science


Author(s):  
Lexi Eikelboom

This book argues that, as a pervasive dimension of human existence with theological implications, rhythm ought to be considered a category of theological significance. Philosophers and theologians have drawn on rhythm—patterned movements of repetition and variation—to describe reality, however, the ways in which rhythm is used and understood differ based on a variety of metaphysical commitments with varying theological implications. This book brings those implications into the open, using resources from phenomenology, prosody, and the social sciences to analyse and evaluate uses of rhythm in metaphysical and theological accounts of reality. The analysis relies on a distinction from prosody between a synchronic approach to rhythm—observing the whole at once and considering how various dimensions of a rhythm hold together harmoniously—and a diachronic approach—focusing on the ways in which time unfolds as the subject experiences it. The text engages with the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara alongside thinkers as diverse as Augustine and the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and proposes an approach to rhythm that serves the concerns of theological conversation. It demonstrates the difference that including rhythm in theological conversation makes to how we think about questions such as “what is creation?” and “what is the nature of the God–creature relationship?” from the perspective of rhythm. As a theoretical category, capable of expressing metaphysical commitments, yet shaped by the cultural rhythms in which those expressing such commitments are embedded, rhythm is particularly significant for theology as a phenomenon through which culture and embodied experience influence doctrine.


Author(s):  
Yusra Ribhi Shawar ◽  
Jennifer Prah Ruger

Careful investigations of the political determinants of health that include the role of power in health inequalities—systematic differences in health achievements among different population groups—are increasing but remain inadequate. Historically, much of the research examining health inequalities has been influenced by biomedical perspectives and focused, as such, on ‘downstream’ factors. More recently, there has been greater recognition of more ‘distal’ and ‘upstream’ drivers of health inequalities, including the impacts of power as expressed by actors, as well as embedded in societal structures, institutions, and processes. The goal of this chapter is to examine how power has been conceptualised and analysed to date in relation to health inequalities. After reviewing the state of health inequality scholarship and the emerging interest in studying power in global health, the chapter presents varied conceptualisations of power and how they are used in the literature to understand health inequalities. The chapter highlights the particular disciplinary influences in studying power across the social sciences, including anthropology, political science, and sociology, as well as cross-cutting perspectives such as critical theory and health capability. It concludes by highlighting strengths and limitations of the existing research in this area and discussing power conceptualisations and frameworks that so far have been underused in health inequalities research. This includes potential areas for future inquiry and approaches that may expand the study of as well as action on addressing health inequality.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110201
Author(s):  
Thomas A. DiPrete ◽  
Brittany N. Fox-Williams

Social inequality is a central topic of research in the social sciences. Decades of research have deepened our understanding of the characteristics and causes of social inequality. At the same time, social inequality has markedly increased during the past 40 years, and progress on reducing poverty and improving the life chances of Americans in the bottom half of the distribution has been frustratingly slow. How useful has sociological research been to the task of reducing inequality? The authors analyze the stance taken by sociological research on the subject of reducing inequality. They identify an imbalance in the literature between the discipline’s continual efforts to motivate the plausibility of large-scale change and its lesser efforts to identify feasible strategies of change either through social policy or by enhancing individual and local agency with the potential to cumulate into meaningful progress on inequality reduction.


Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bargetz

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well‐known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics.


1952 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 660-676 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roscoe C. Martin

By tradition public administration is regarded as a division of political science. Woodrow Wilson set the stage for this concept in his original essay identifying public administration as a subject worthy of special study, and spokesmen for both political science and public administration have accepted it since. Thus Leonard White, in his 1930 article on the subject in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, recognizes public administration as “a branch of the field of political science.” Luther Gulick follows suit, observing in 1937 that “Public administration is thus a division of political science ….” So generally has this word got around that it has come to the notice of the sociologists, as is indicated in a 1950 report of the Russell Sage Foundation which refers to “political science, including public administration….” “Pure” political scientists and political scientists with a public administration slant therefore are not alone in accepting this doctrine, which obviously enjoys a wide and authoritative currency.But if public administration is reckoned generally to be a child of political science, it is in some respects a strange and unnatural child; for there is a feeling among political scientists, substantial still if mayhap not so widespread as formerly, that academicians who profess public administration spend their time fooling with trifles. It was a sad day when the first professor of political science learned what a manhole cover is! On their part, those who work in public administration are likely to find themselves vaguely resentful of the lack of cordiality in the house of their youth.


1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter

“Let us apply to the political and moral sciences the method founded upon observation and upon calculus, the method which has served us so well in the natural sciences.” The social sciences have known no truer follower of Laplace's dictum than Adolphe Quetelet. His mécanique sociale, later physique sociale, was conceived as the social analogue to Laplace's mecanique celeste, and embodied the results of an unswerving commitment not only to the presumed method of celestial physics, but even to its concepts and vocabulary. It is too weak to say that Quetelet's goal was the transmission of the achievements of celestial physics into the social sphere. He aspired to nothing less than imitation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-163
Author(s):  
Daniel Renfrew ◽  
Thomas W. Pearson

This article examines the social life of PFAS contamination (a class of several thousand synthetic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) and maps the growing research in the social sciences on the unique conundrums and complex travels of the “forever chemical.” We explore social, political, and cultural dimensions of PFAS toxicity, especially how PFAS move from unseen sites into individual bodies and into the public eye in late industrial contexts; how toxicity is comprehended, experienced, and imagined; the factors shaping regulatory action and ignorance; and how PFAS have been the subject of competing forms of knowledge production. Lastly, we highlight how people mobilize collectively, or become demobilized, in response to PFAS pollution/ toxicity. We argue that PFAS exposure experiences, perceptions, and responses move dynamically through a “toxicity continuum” spanning invisibility, suffering, resignation, and refusal. We off er the concept of the “toxic event” as a way to make sense of the contexts and conditions by which otherwise invisible pollution/toxicity turns into public, mass-mediated, and political episodes. We ground our review in our ongoing multisited ethnographic research on the PFAS exposure experience.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilde Heynen

Making Home(s) in Displacement critically rethinks the relationship between home and displacement from a spatial, material, and architectural perspective. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has investigated how migrants and refugees create and reproduce home under new conditions, thereby unpacking the seemingly contradictory positions of making a home and overcoming its loss. Yet, making home(s) in displacement is also a spatial practice, one which intrinsically relates to the fabrication of the built environment worldwide. Conceptually the book is divided along four spatial sites, referred to as camp, shelter, city, and house, which are approached with a multitude of perspectives ranging from urban planning and architecture to anthropology, geography, philosophy, gender studies, and urban history, all with a common focus on space and spatiality. By articulating everyday homemaking experiences of migrants and refugees as spatial practices in a variety of geopolitical and historical contexts, this edited volume adds a novel perspective to the existing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of home and displacement. It equally intends to broaden the canon of architectural histories and theories by including migrants' and refugees' spatial agencies and place-making practices to its annals. By highlighting the political in the spatial, and vice versa, this volume sets out to decentralise and decolonise current definitions of home and displacement, striving for a more pluralistic outlook on the idea of home.


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